"Backwards"

Listeners new to Alice Cohen's work might hear the slinky synths and programmed pads of "Backwards" and assume the song is influenced by the darker side of disco's heyday. But Cohen's music isn't a nostalgia act—at least not in the way you'd think. Though she's flown under the radar for most of her career, Cohen has been crafting lucid pop songs for nearly four decades. For much of the 1980s, she sang for Philly new wave band the Vels, who once toured with the Psychedelic Furs and shared a producer with Tom Tom Club; in the '90s Cohen fronted Die Monster Die, whose single "Swallowed" is an unsung grunge gem that could find a second life today among Waxahatchee fans.

This is to say that Cohen isn't mining the past for inspiration, but refining a sound she helped create. Like the music on 2012's Pink Keys, "Backwards" is a touch kitschy, with an aesthetic that combines Glass Candy's fog-machined chic with cosmic imagery. "Backwards" is taken from Into the Grey Salons, which, like Cohen's last two LPs, will be released via the boutique label Olde English Spelling Bee. Similarly, past OESB artists (Stellar OM Source, James Ferraro) have shared a desire to expand a listener's consciousness with music. "My purpose is similar to the function of dreams: to take the listener to their inner planes," Cohen has said. "I like to think of it as a musical version of astral traveling." But unlike those contemporaries, only Cohen can truly claim to have evolved from new wave to new age in real time.